Endofullerenes could be used in miniature atomic clocks for super-accurate GPS.

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Designer Carbon Materials, an Oxford-based scientific startup, has recently sold its first 200 micrograms of nitrogen atom-based endohedral fullerenes for £22,000 ($33,400)—or about £110 million ($167 million) per gram.

This valuation likely makes the material the second most valuable on Earth, preceded only by antimatter, which is estimated by NASA to cost some £41 trillion per gram.

The material, which essentially is a cage of carbon atoms with a nitrogen atom inside, could be used for very small and very accurate atomic clocks, which are currently of the size of a room.

“Imagine a minaturised atomic clock that you could carry around in your smartphone,” the company's founder Dr. Kyriakos Porfyrakis told The Telegraph. “This is the next revolution for mobile.”

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One of the problems a miniature atomic clock can solve is the positioning of driverless cars. With normal GPS navigation offering an accuracy to within a few yards, it could be tricky to properly track and control the vehicles. Throw an atomic clock into the mix, however, and you can get the accuracy resolution down to around 1mm.

These tiny atomic clocks, however, won't be around any time soon. Porfyrakis told Ars Technica in a phone interview that the first batch of the material was sold to a consortium of researchers in the UK and US, including those from Oxford University, who "work on the production of atomic clocks based on this material."

"It will take them a few years to finalise this research project," he added. "If there will be a final product, it should be miniature enough to go into portable devices."

The buckyballs

First discovered in 1985, endohedral fullerenes are created by incarcerating an atom (not necessarily nitrogen) into a cage of 60 carbon atoms. In these cages, also known as buckminsterfullerenes, carbon atoms align in a similar way to the vertices of a football, which is where their nickname "bucky balls" comes from. These caged molecules have greatly enhanced physical and electronic properties compared to "normal" ones. In case of N@C60 (i.e. nitrogen atom-based endofullerenes), the "super power" is a long electron spin lifetime.

The research of one of the most expensive materials on Earth hasn't been cheap, either. In 2013, Oxford University together with two partners received a £1.5 million research grant to develop manufacturing methods "for increasing the production of endohedral fullerenes to the gram scale."

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"Hopefully, in the next two three years we should be able to achieve this," said Porfyrakis, who still heads a research group in the university.

At the moment, Designer Carbon Materials can produce "up to half a gram a day" of cheaper and lower-purity material, which means that there will be more empty carbon cages than those with a nitrogen atom inside.

"As for the higher-purity material, we can make 50 milligrams of it, and that would take us weeks to purify," said Porfyrakis.

The Oxford-based company is seemingly the only one in the world that has commercialised the production of N@C60, Porfyrakis added. There are however, metal-based endofullerenes that are easier to produce and purify; those are available from a few companies worldwide.

Being a sort of monopolist on the market, Porfyrakis is optimistic about the commercial prospects of his startup.

"We're a new company, only starting to sell the product,"he said. "But after the first sale we have more requests from around the world, so the demand seems to be increasing."

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Andrii Degeler
Andrii is a contributing reporter at Ars Technica UK, covering a wide range of topics from policy to hardware and crowdfunding. He holds a master's degree in Journalism from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Emailandrii@proceed.to//Twitter@adegeler